You hear a lot these days about the coming “new golden age” in American philanthropy. Members of Gen X and Gen Y—some of them billionaires by their own efforts, the rest of them about to inherit $40 trillion from baby-boom parents—are said to be looking for ways to make a mark. Let’s hope so. The bar set by previous golden ages is high. In towns all across America you can pick out an Andrew Carnegie library from half a mile away—he built more than 1,500 of them. Carnegie was a tough-minded industrialist whose maxims have a Sorkin-esque, Silicon Valley ring: “The first man gets the oyster. The second man gets the shell.” His perspective changed when he turned to good works. “As I grow older,” he once said, “I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” As a flinty Scot, Carnegie believed that, in terms of efficiency and know-how, helping people out could be as much a “business” as manufacturing chemicals or building ships.
In 2001, the institutions that grew out of Andrew Carnegie’s vast endowment—essentially, the proceeds from the sale of Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan’s newly formed U.S. Steel a century earlier—banded together to create the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. It is very much a “watch what they do” award: the medal is conferred for the achievement of “real and permanent good”—not exactly a low bar. This year’s recipients are Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; the duty-free-shop entrepreneur Charles Feeney, founder of the Atlantic Philanthropies; Hanne and Jeremy Grantham, supporters of climate-change research; the Haas family, longtime funders and stewards of Philadelphia’s William Penn Foundation; Jon M. Huntsman Sr., one of the largest individual philanthropic donors in the country; Joan and Irwin Jacobs, major donors to universities and to science and engineering; Richard and Robert Menschel, active on behalf of many causes; and David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, whose support has helped a variety of educational and cultural institutions. Rubenstein, who in 2007 bought the last privately owned copy of Magna Carta (for $21 million; he promptly lent it to the National Archives), also donated funds to restore the Washington Monument and rebuild the Mulberry Row slave quarters at Monticello. Allen, Feeney, Huntsman, Rubenstein, and Joan and Irwin Jacobs are signatories of the Giving Pledge, vowing to donate more than half of their wealth to philanthropy.
